Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.

– Thomas Hardy

The line “consigned to existlessness” was later changed to “dissolved to wan wistlessness”. I’ve chosen the earlier version because I like it better. The woman was probably Emma, Hardy’s first wife, whose death haunted the poet. The sussurrant S’s in the third stanza provide an appropriate soundtrack to the woman’s soft fading, as does the echoed “call to me, call to me” like words screamed into the wind. In the final stanza, the meter breaks down alongside the narrator’s mindset (accompanied by those ghostly indents).

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable —
But we looked into fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

The repeated lines are the immoveable objects (the blunt narrative arc) of memory around which all other details swirl. There were apples. There were pears. A newspaper landed on a hand but fluttered away. Insignificant things, and Millay recounts them in such a deadpan manner that we wonder if they even matter. But of course they do. It’s always the details that anchor memories, that mean so much in so little.

There is a children’s game where Kid A mouths the words “olive juice” to Kid B who immediately misreads the lip movements as “I love you”. Hilarity ensues.
Olivejuiceolovejuiceilovejewsiloveewesiloveyou.

There are four types of names at play here: the onomatopoetic (paw-paw-paw), the eponymic (McFleery’s pomma), the seemingly exotic (awagabu, mashawok), and names that describe the creature (lily-eater, whitestap). Curiously, McFleery’s pomma suggests that there is another man besides Adam walking around Eden. Ferdinand de Saussure might delight in witnessing how the animal’s names came about; they are arbitrary insofar as they spawn from Adam’s whim, but I’d like to think there are reasons behind each name. Paw-paw-paw must be a mammal, rivarn perhaps a stripy antelope-like thing, whitestap a nervous bird, and the glurd either an oafish ungulate or a big stupid fish.

Hurrah there, Hosty, frosty Hosty, change that shirt on ye,
Rhyme the rann, the king of all ranns!

Balbaccio, balbuccio!

We had chaw chaw chops, chairs, chewing gum, the chicken-pox and china
chambers
Universally provided by this soffsoaping salesman.
Small wonder He’ll Cheat E’erawan our local lads nicknamed him.
When Chimpden first took the floor

With his bucketshop store
Down Bargainweg, Lower.

So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous
But soon we’ll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery
And ’tis short till sheriff Clancy’ll be winding up his unlimited company
With the bailiff’s bom at the door,

Bimbam at the door.
Then he’ll bum no more.

Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island
The hooker of that hammerfast viking
And Gall’s curse on the day when Eblana bay
Saw his black and tan man-o’-war.

It was during some fresh water garden pumping
Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the monkeys
That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey
Made bold a maid to woo

Woohoo, what’ll she doo!
The general lost her maidenloo!

He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher,
For to go and shove himself that way on top of her.
Begob, he’s the crux of the catalogue
Of our antediluvial zoo,

Messrs Billing and Coo.
Noah’s larks, good as noo.

He was joulting by Wellinton’s monument
Our rotorious hippopopotamuns
When some bugger let down the backtrap of the omnibus
And he caught his death of fusiliers,

With his rent in his rears.
Give him six years.

‘Tis sore pity for his innocent poor children
But look out for his missus legitimate!
When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker
Won’t there be earwigs on the green?

Big earwigs on the green,
The largest ever you seen.

Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses!

Then we’ll have a free trade Gael’s band and mass meeting
For to sod him the brave son of Scandiknavery.
And we’ll bury him down in Oxmanstown
Along with the devil and the Danes,

With the deaf and dumb Danes,
And all their remains.

And not all the king’s men nor his horses
Will resurrect his corpus
For there’s no true spell in Connacht or hell
That’s able to raise a Cain.

– James Joyce

For Bloomsday, let us bypass the most famous day in literature and focus on its most famous night, Finnegans Wake, that endless onion of paronomasia and elusive allusions. “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” floats somewhere near the beginning of Joyce’s dream stream, and comes to us as Humpty Dumpty’s tale horribly water-warped.

From the ocean floors, where the necrovores
Of the zoöoögenous mud
Fight for their share, to the Andes where
Bullllamas thunder and thud,

And even thence to the heavens, whence
Archchurchmen appear to receive
The shortwave stations of rival nations
Of angels: “Believe! Believe!”

They battle, they battle — poor put-upon cattle,
Each waging, reluctantly,
That punitive war on the disagreeor
Which falls to the disagreeee.

– George Starbuck

No four-letter words, but Roy Blunt Jr. in Alphabet Juice gives plenty of three-and-four-dot words. A scholar who studies the victims of Vesuvius? Pompeiiicist. The town where Dr. Livingston was found, presumably? Ujiji. My own entries are more whimsical. A frolic in Natural Artesian Water? Fijiing. That one is a Newton’s cradle of dots. There is also Wiiitis, muscle aches that occur when one plays too much Wii, which, before its I’s are dotted and its T’s are crossed, would look something like Wɪɪɪɪɪs, a trump to Starbuck’s four four-letter words — but not mine. Soporific ostentation? Pizzazzzzz.